


Mementoes

by CorwinOfAmber



Category: Fringe
Genre: Family, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-27
Updated: 2012-11-27
Packaged: 2017-11-19 16:04:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,638
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/575082
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CorwinOfAmber/pseuds/CorwinOfAmber
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A trip to the lake in 2036 gives Etta the opportunity to learn the history of the Bishop family.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Mementoes

As she moved purposefully between the wreckage of bombed out dwellings after midnight, Etta never once considered turning back, even though the streets of Brookline in 2024 were no place for a thirteen year old girl.

She'd picked tonight because of the light of the full moon, had painstakingly done research on the nets, until she had a map to what pre-invasion property records claimed was the Bishop house. She had a big metal LED flashlight that could double as a club if necessary, a fighting knife strapped strapped to the inside of her left forearm, and a bag of cashews in case she had to bribe her way out of trouble.

Etta followed the map on her phone, and found the house on Quincy street without incident, only touching the haft of her knife once, to scare off a scavenger who gave her an unfriendly eye. She used the flashlight to survey the wreckage, and decided that simply going in the front door wasn't a viable option. She picked a ground floor window, the glass having been broken long before, and crawled through.

“Bingo!” she said, when her eyes adjusted to the darkness.

Etta was in a small bathroom. Even though it was dark, a decade's worth of dust covered everything and there were cracks in the walls it looked familiar, like a half-remembered dream.

She reached out and gave a pink plastic octopus, still sitting on the edge of the bathtub, a tentative squeeze. It squeaked pathetically, blowing a cloud of dust out of its hollow tentacles. Etta recalled little about her childhood, but she remembered the octopus.

Flashlight in hand, she took her time exploring the house, aware that it didn't quite match her childhood memories. The first floor had been looted of anything valuable years before, but the layout was familiar, and she carefully made her way up the stairs to a long hallway.

One room was clearly a child's bedroom – the walls had been carefully painted to resemble a verdant meadow at night, with stars on the ceiling above.

On the wall next to the closet she found a height chart, “Henrietta” scrawled in chalk at the top, and suddenly it hit her – the half-remembered life she'd had before the invasion, that had ended that dreamlike day in the park with her parents running toward her in terror – it had all happened. They'd had her, held her and loved her, and she'd been taken from them, with the arrival of the invaders.

Etta sat with her back to the wall, next to the height chart and wept in the darkness until she felt better. When she stood and wiped her face, she felt a new resolve. One day, she would find her parents, or at least find out exactly what had happened to them.

She moved back into the hall, and walked with purpose, feeling a new familiarity with her surroundings. She remembered her parents room was just down the hall, and she found it easily. That room was looted also, trash thrown about haphazardly, but her light revealed a jewelry box dismissively tossed into a corner. She crouched and opened it, and a cardboard matchbox tumbled out onto the floor.

Etta picked it up and shook it, and something small but solid rattled around inside. She opened and upended the matchbox, and a shiny, metal object tumbled into her waiting palm. A misshapen, spent bullet. She wondered who Mom had shot and why it was so important she wanted to keep a souvenir.

Etta closed her fingers around the cold metal slug. Touching it, she felt a connection to Olivia Dunham, across the gulf of years between them. She put the bullet into her pocket and inspected the rest of the bedroom.

“Huh, I don't remember that,” she exclaimed, when her light found a framed picture still hanging on the wall, the glass of the frame cracked but otherwise untouched by time.

The picture was of her mother, but her hair had been dyed red, and she held an infant boy in her arms, smiling brightly at the camera. To Etta's knowledge, she didn't have any siblings, so the boy must be her cousin Eddie, she decided. But it didn't look like Eddie, or his father Greg. 

When she touched the picture, she shivered. Somehow, it felt out of place, and just wrong.

Etta felt her phone buzz in her jacket pocket. Her foster-mother had discovered her absence. She hurriedly removed the picture from the frame, folded it and put it into her pocket, even though it felt wrong to take it. 

She ended up being grounded for a month, but it was worth it, and she accepted her punishment without objection for once. The bullet she put on a silver chain that went around her neck, and the old photo went into her own jewelry box where it remained forgotten for another ten years.

"I remember where it is!", Walter Bishop's shout of enthusiastic joy echoed through the confines of the small apartment on the north side of Boston.

Etta sat up, startled out of deep slumber, and instinctively grabbed for her pistol on the nightstand. The clock on the nightstand said it was 3:22 am. The silhouette in the bed opposite hers sat up and turned on the lights. Astrid rolled her eyes, and reached for a sweater.

“Still glad you got us out of the amber, sweetie?”, Astrid muttered.

Etta simply smiled and nodded, earning a smile from the older woman. She cherished having family again, despite their quirks.

"Walter! Get out of our room!" she heard Peter yell.

Etta had barely been able to conceal her joy when her parents had obviously started sharing a bed again. But in the days that followed, she wondered how she'd ever been conceived, with her grandfathers tendency to burst in on them unannounced, in the middle of the night.

"I listened at the door! And I must say, you young lovers look adorable as you cuddle in your sleep."

Etta had concluded that her mother had the patience of a saint.

She put her pistol back on the nightstand, and grabbed the pair of sweatpants she'd thrown on the floor when she'd gone to bed. If Walter was having one of his manic episodes, none of them were going to get back to sleep. She might as well start some tea.

The family gradually gathered in the living room, yawning and stretching, as they waited for the teapot to sing and to hear Walter's explanation of what was going on.

“The Plug!” Walter exclaimed, gesticulating wildly, “...that I made to seal dimensional portals. I need it, and I've been trying to remember where I put it.”

“The beachhouse at Reiden Lake.” Peter said, “...at least that's where it...was. And assuming the beachhouse is still there.”

Walter peered at him, startled. “You knew? All along? I've been trying to remember for days! Why didn't you tell me?”

“You didn't tell me you needed it, Walter,” Peter replied, his tone suggesting he was more amused by this father's antics, than anything.

Once again, Etta admired her father's loving patience when dealing with Walter.

“Inconsequential details! We need to go there, immediately.” Walter said.

Peter yawned.

“Nope, let's all go back to bed. We can have breakfast in the morning, pile into the station wagon and take a road trip.” 

Peter took Olivia's hand and led her to their room, leaving a sputtering scientist in their wake.

“Good night, Walter,” Olivia said, and shut the door in his face.

The teapot started singing.

They rose with the sun, ate their typical plain breakfast, and gathered what they thought they would need for a short trip into the country. Then they piled into the ancient station wagon they had liberated a few days before and they were off for their latest adventure.

"So what's special about the lakehouse?" Etta asked, once they were safely out of the city, "Any stories to tell?"

Peter drove, with Walter beside him in the passenger seat. Etta was sitting between Olivia and Astrid in the back seat.

"What's special about the lakehouse," Peter muttered to himself, glancing in the rear view mirror, "Oh, you've actually been there before. Olivia and I needed to get away so we took a long weekend and drove out there. I think you were two and a half?"

"You were two years and nine months," Olivia corrected with a smile, "You and your father built a huge sand castle. He had decided you were going to be an engineer."

"I don't remember that," Walter said.

"Well, you were who we wanted to get away from," Peter replied.

"Oh," Walter said, "...I understand completely. I can be difficult at times."

The trip that that would have taken an hour twenty years before took twice that long due to poor road conditions, abandoned vehicles and wildlife unafraid of them. Peter had to slam on the brakes and swerve frequently, making for a nerve wracking trip.

During the less exiting stretches, Peter and Walter began taking turns telling stories, mostly about the Bishop family. Etta listened raptly, eager for details of the family she'd lost when she was three years old.

It wasn't long before Etta noticed something odd – Peter and Walter's stories frequently didn't quite match, even when they told the same story from their different perspectives. She supposed that her grandfather's memory wasn't very good, and that she should just believe her father's telling of events, especially since when Olivia spoke up, she seemed to agree with Peter. 

But it stuck in her head, another mystery of the Bishop family. She'd figure it all out eventually, she knew.

At the end of a two and a half hour drive, Peter drove down a nearly overgrown path, at the end of which was an abandoned house that was in surprisingly good condition for not having been occupied for over two decades. Beyond was Reiden Lake, metallic grey from the clouds reflected in it's waters.

They got out of the station wagon and stretched collectively, then followed Walter and Peter up to the front door. Walter carefully peeled back a loose shingle to the left of the door, revealing a key, which he took and used to unlock the door.

The interior had the expected musty smell of a long abandoned and shut up dwelling, but was in fairly good condition otherwise, despite the dust. The house had a distinct rustic feel, with knotty pine paneling and charmingly out of date furnishings. It was also, Etta found to her delight, a repository of Bishop family lore. Every room had pictures, framed newspaper cut-outs, holiday cards or the like.

Olivia and Astrid began opening windows to let fresh air into the house, while Peter and Walter began searching for the device they had come to collect.

Etta was drawn to the shelves full of pictures. She lost track of the time as she examined the collection of family heirlooms, and the next time she looked up she saw her father's smiling face watching her.

"There aren't any pictures of you past seven or eight years old, Dad," Etta said, swiping dust from each of the pictures on a shelf in it's turn. Walter, a beautiful woman she assumed was her grandmother, but the only pictures of her father were as a young child.

Peter's frowned.

"No. There wouldn't be. And these aren't of me, either."

At her inquiring look, he shrugged. "It's a long, long story, kiddo. I'll tell you sometime soon, when we have some downtime."

Etta pointed to the beautiful, dark haired woman in one photograph.

"Is she my grandma?" she asked.

Peter's smiled. "Yeah, that's Elizabeth..."

Then Walter yelled his name from another room, Peter rolled his eyes at the poorly timed interruption, and left to help his father.

“Elizabeth,” Etta repeated, associating the name with the face, “Hi grandma, I'm Etta.”

She knew her grandmother on the Dunham side was Marilyn, which was also her middle name. She wondered if Peter had chosen the name Henrietta, and where it had come from.

Etta continued her hunt for family heirlooms while the others searched for whatever crazy old device Walter wanted. She found a yellowing, empty paper envelope, and began stuffing pictures into it - one each of Walter, Dad, and the grandmother she had never met, and one of the three of them together.

She noticed the top of the frame of another picture, barely visible on top of a tall bookshelf, and dragged a wooden chair over to use as a step. When she stood on it and viewed the top of the bookcase, she was pleased to find a number of pictures that she couldn't have seen otherwise.

"Jackpot!" she said.

One picture in particular caught her interest - it was of an older Peter, apparently taken at some family function, as he wore a suit and tie. Growth spurts had apparently started, and the adorable awkwardness of a teenage boy was in full display.

She heard the floorboards creak, and her mother entered the room, gave her a broad smile.

"Etta, how's the family history tour going?" Olivia asked.

"Great! I just found a good one of Dad!"

Etta stepped down carefully from the chair, then sat down on it with the framed picture in question in her lap. She carefully removed it from the frame and handed it to Olivia.

Olivia looked at the picture of her husband as a teen, then cocked an eyebrow, as if in puzzlement.

"There's a date in pencil, on the back," Etta reaching out to tap the back of the photograph.

Olivia turned the picture around, looked at the date scrawled with elegant penmanship, that she assumed was Elizabeth Bishop's. She frowned, turned the photo around to look at the picture again.

"That's impossible,” Olivia muttered, frowning

Etta had started to ask why, when Peter entered the room.

"Nothing is impossible!" He declared in a deliberately cocky tone of voice, "...Walter  
found the Plug. We can grab a few mementos and head back to Boston."

He stood next to Olivia, and looked at the picture in her hand. His smile disappeared. Peter reached out and gently took the photo in question, turned the photo around and looked at the date. He gasped and dropped the picture, as if it had shocked him, then fled the house, opening the sliding glass doors with a loud creak.

"Peter?" Olivia followed her husband.

Puzzled by her parents behavior, Etta crouched down and picked up the photograph that had caused so much consternation. She blew the dust off, and looked at the date. 

It said Peter, July, 1992.

Etta looked out through the glass doors. Her parents were on the porch, leaning over the wooden railing, looking out over the lake, talking in low whispers. Olivia's hand was caressing Peter's back in a soothing manner. 

Presently, Olivia turned and stuck her head through the open sliding door, and looked at her.

“This has nothing to do with you, Etta. We're just...going to need a few minutes, alone.”

Then she slid the door closed and went back to comforting Peter.

She heard the floorboards creak again, looked up to see Astrid walk into the room.

“What's going on?” Astrid asked.

“I don't know, Aunt Astrid. I showed this picture,” she handed the object in question over, “...to Mom and Dad, and they both got upset. Dad more so.”

Astrid glanced out the sliding glass doors at Peter and Olivia, worry evident on her features, then examined the picture. When she looked at the date, her eyebrows shot up in surprise.

“That's...” she started to say.

“...impossible.” Etta finished for her, “...that's what they said. What's going on?”

Astrid glanced out the glass doors again, past the hunched figures of Peter and Olivia she could see a storm brewing over the lake. Then she sighed, and turned back to Etta.

“It's not my tale to tell,” Astrid said, “But what I'd like you to do sweetie, is go through all of the knicknacks and doodads, and find anything from the '90s or maybe later. It could be important. I'm going to go find Walter.”

Etta spent the rest of the afternoon discovering and sorting various artifacts. There were a few other pictures from the '90's, identifiable by the date carefully written on the back in what must have been Elizabeth's elegant handwriting. A digital music player from no manufacturer she had ever heard of, but the label listed it as patent pending,  
1991, which seemed far too early. A flat screen TV that appeared to have fifty years of dust on it.

Peter and Olivia spent all that time outside wandering the grounds, talking. Her father seemed to calm down, somewhat. At one point, they took a walk down to the shore, hand in hand and looked out over the water, still talking.

In the meantime, Astrid had located Walter and brought him into the room to look at the pile of objects Etta had laid out.

“I don't remember this,” Walter said, rubbing dust off of the television, “...of course, my memory is like swiss cheese put through a meat grinder these days, so that doesn't necessarily mean anything.”

Etta handed him a picture of Elizabeth. The date printed on the edge of the film itself was 1996, although there was no confirmation that was the year the photograph had been taken.

Walter's face slackened as he gazed at the photograph, his thumb ghosting across the surface, as if attempting to touch his wife's long gone face.

"I wish I could have met her," Etta said, "...you and Dad talk of her in such glowing terms."

Walter shook his head, "Sadly, it was not to be. She would have adored you, my dear."

Then he sighed.

"Well, I know what has Peter so upset. This picture can't exist. Your grandmother was dead by the time this was taken."

Etta's eyes widened with surprise. “Really? What do you think of this one?”

She handed her grandfather the picture of teenage Peter. "This is the one that got Dad upset."

Walter face turned grim as he carefully examined the photograph. He touched it with his fingers and turned it to examine it from all angles.

"Yes, this should upset him. You see, Henrietta, Peter, or rather, my Peter, died in 1985. We have much to explain to you."

Outside, the first peal of thunder rolled across the lake.

An hour later, Etta sat in a wicker rocking chair, her mind reeling with the implications of what Walter had told her.

The story involving parallel worlds, kidnapping, genetic defects, time travel, dimension threshing machines, non-existence and suicide was difficult to believe, especially coming from a certified loon like her grandfather. But Astrid had been there nodding the whole time, occasionally adding details, although she insisted she hadn't been present for much of it. Astrid certainly wasn't insane, and her confirmation added a lot of credibility to the unlikely story.

But then, she had grown up in a world dominated by time traveling invaders. She supposed it didn't get much weirder than that.

Outside, a thunderstorm took its anger out on the world, with flashes of lightning and crashes of thunder. When the rain had started, Peter and Olivia had come back inside. Peter had made a beeline for the liquor cabinet, while her mother announced that they would be spending the night at the lake house, because it would be too dangerous to travel in the storm.

After, Olivia crouched next to her chair and grasped her hand.

"Your father is having a long overdue, and well deserved existential crisis," Olivia told her, "....make sure he understands that you love him very much."

"I wasn't aware that was in question," Etta said.

They watched Peter take another long drag from the bottle of whiskey in his hand. Outside, thunder echoed menacingly across the lake. Olivia gave her a half smile.

"It isn't, but he's still going to need to know," Olivia said,"...especially when he wakes up with a hangover tomorrow."

“I remember that picture.” Peter blurted, apropos nothing, some hours later.

The sun had long since set, and the family had gathered in the main room of the lakehouse, oil lamps had been located and lit. They had eaten a small meal, made from the limited supplies they had brought and started a game of cards.

Peter had sat in the corner, in an old lounge chair, and continued to drink, occasionally muttering to himself.

“It was taken at my piano recital. Not long before Walter went to Saint-Claire's. But that was...somewhere else. A different lifetime. It's gone, because I made a different choice in the Machine.”

He took a shuddering breath before continuing, clearly this topic was painful to him.

“My history, in the present, starts from waking up out there, in 2011.”

He made a dramatic sweep of his arm toward the lake through the windows, and a flash of lightning lit the waters and added fortuitous melodrama.

“There's no trace of me before then. I accepted that, made it part of me. It was actually a bit of a relief, because I got a do-over of whatever bad choices I'd made before that.”

He took another sip of whiskey, swallowed it, and gave a long, ragged sigh.

“The easiest explanation is that I've simply lost my mind,” Peter said.

“That's not the only possible explanation, Peter,” Walter said, shaking his head, and throwing his hand of cards on the table.

“I didn't say it was the only explanation, Walter, I said it was the simplest...these objects couldn't possibly exist, therefore they don't, and I'm just imagining them. Maybe I'm still in amber and dreaming, or I'm still in the Machine, or...maybe I died and this is some kind of afterlife.”

Walter sighed.

“There is more than one of everything, Peter. You know this as well as I do. These are all objects from parallel worlds that were deposited here through some as yet unknown mechanism. That's all it is. Think of everything we've seen and done these past few years.”

“Honestly, spacetime and the barriers between worlds have been interfered with so much in the past few decades, I'm surprised something like this hasn't happened before. The Observers migrating through time en masse probably didn't help.”

Walter turned to his son and took his hand.

“Peter, we'll figure it out like any case we used to have. Let's come up with a testable hypothesis and then prove or disprove it. We'll do it together.”

Peter rubbed his face tiredly, his stubble making a rasping noise like fine-grained sandpaper on wood.

“I'm too drunk and tired for any of that tonight. In fact, I'm gonna take my wasted ass to bed before I embarrass myself in front of the family, even more.”

“Peter...” Olivia sighed.

He held his hands up. “No, I'm fine...night all.”

Peter struggled to get out of the old easy chair, finally stood up, and threw the now empty bottle into a nearby bin.

"Dad..." Etta walked over to him and stood tiptoe to kiss him on the cheek, earning herself a broad smile.

"Thanks, princess."

They watched him walk unsteadily toward the bedrooms in the back of the house.

Peter felt warm breath on his neck, a sharp nip at his earlobe.

"Liv?", he rasped.

"Who else would be nibbling your ear in the middle of the night, Peter?", came the amused reply.

Peter groaned and rolled onto his back. Olivia repositioned with catlike grace, so that she was leaning over him, supporting herself on one elbow, gazing down at him with a combination of tenderness and amusement on her beautiful face.

"I'm sorry, that was selfish of me and..." Peter mumbled, still half asleep.

Olivia shushed him by pressing her fingers to his lips, then leaned down to kiss him. 

Peter tasted whiskey on her lips, more expensive stuff than what he'd been drinking. 

When she pulled away, she reached up to caress his cheek.

"You have nothing to be sorry for, Peter. You've had it just as rough as the rest of us, and you've been my rock. Normally, it's you comforting me. How many times have you told me I'm not a freak, I'm not a jinx, that I'm a good wife, good mother, that I'm...beautiful? Let me return the favor.”

Peter felt his eyes moisten and his throat start to close up. His arm curled around her waist and his fingers found her long hair.

Olivia gazed into his eyes for a moment before continuing.

"You're the love of my life. I loved you back from wherever you were, because I needed you that much. And I'll do it again, however many times it takes for us to have our happy ending."

"Liv," he repeated, dumbstruck.

She kissed him again on the lips, then laid her head on his chest. Her hand caressed his chest as his hands gently stroked her hair.

They slept.

Later, Peter woke with a groan. He heard Olivia snicker next to him, then a whisper, “How are you feeling?”

“Um. Okay, all things considered." He replied, "...Wow!"

"What?"

Olivia rolled onto her side, fitting herself neatly against his body.

Peter opened his mouth, started to say something, but hesitated.

"What?" Olivia prompted him, then, "...you know you can tell me anything." Peter nodded.

"It's just...I kind of wish we'd had more normal lives.", he said morosely.

Olivia smiled and kissed him. "If we'd had more normal lives, we never would have met."

“I concede your point.” he replied, “What time is it?”

“Six o'clock.”

“Oh, God.” Peter sat up with another groan. “Oh. There's the headache. I knew I was missing something. I haven't drank that much since...”

He stopped, realizing that he hadn't drank that much since Olivia had died in the averted timeline. But that hadn't happened? Or had it? He really didn't know anymore. Maybe the only thing that really mattered was the here and now.

They were surprised to find Walter, Astrid and Etta already up.

"He kept us up all night with his theorizing," Astrid said in explanation.Etta waved, yawned and returned to working on a tablet computer.

Scraps of paper with random scribbles covered every possible writing surface in the room, the result of Walter's mind trying to work out the problem at hand.

"Peter and Olivia, good morning!" Walter greeted them warmly, "..I hope you both got a good nights sleep, because we have much work to do."

"Well enough, considering," Peter said, "...what's going on?"

Peter and Olivia accepted egg sticks from Astrid and munched while Walter began his  
explanation.

"I have a...hypothesis. But before I explain it further, I think we need to determine if the phenomenon is confined to this area, or if it only involves us, personally."

"I may be able to answer that," Etta said, raising her hand as if she were in a classroom, "the answer to both is no."

"You may proceed, dear," Walter said.

"Since I was little, I've been hearing weird stories. People talk, you know. Objects would appear in places or times where they couldn't be, like the pictures we found. Sometimes someone would find a newly taken picture of a loved that had died years before, little things like that. I've been scouring the 'nets for this stuff all night. I've got a list..."

Etta handed the tablet over to Olivia, who peered at the screen, raised an eyebrow and began reading.

"Let's see - a lot of impossible family photos, like ours. Lost family heirlooms suddenly reappear. household items never purchased appear in peoples houses. A family dog that died suddenly came home one day. The dogs grave in the backyard was undisturbed."

"That could just be a look alike dog," Peter said, taking the role of the skeptic.

Olivia nodded and continued.

"Husband dies in a car accident. A year after the funeral, widow rolls over and finds him in bed next to her. He knows nothing about an accident, claims to have been there all along. When the authorities open the grave, suspecting insurance fraud, they discover the husbands body, decomposing normally..."

Olivia shuddered and wordlessly handed the tablet to Astrid, and went to stand next to Peter, clasping his hand in hers.

"Just realized, eh?" Peter said quietly. Olivia nodded.

The fact that there actually was a grave somewhere with Peter's name on it, and that there was actually a body buried there, was something she'd managed to avoid thinking about through the years.

Etta raised an inquiring eyebrow at them, but no explanation was forthcoming.

Astrid swiped her finger upward on the screen, making the list of incidents scroll.

"Etta, there are over three hundred incidents in your list! And they seem to be occurring more often as time passes."

"Temporal displacement," Walter muttered.

“What Walter?” Peter asked.

"An analogy. Think of time as a body of water. As the lake in fact!"

Walter stood in front of the glass doors and made an expansive gesture, his arms seeming to encompass the lake beyond, from one side to the other.

"One side of the lake is the future, the other is the past. Now, what happens if you get into a boat on one side of the lake, start the engine and very quickly move to the other side?"

"You get seasick?" Astrid said, "...at least I do."

Walter glared at her, not amused, "Be serious, Estelle!"

Etta grinned, but provided the answer Walter was looking for. "You make waves!"

"Yes, waves! Now picture a piece of wood floating at the surface of the lake. What happens to the wood when the boat passes by?"

"It's moved by the waves..." Etta replied.

"Walter, are you saying that the Observers moving through time displaced these objects and people? That they were...caught in the Observers wake?", Peter interjected.

Walter nodded. 

"I'm sure the actual mechanics are much more complicated than water waves, but I think the analogy is a good one. Objects caught in the temporal wake would seem to appear at random in the present, but that's mainly because of our limited perception of time. When the Observers moved through time, they didn't simply disappear from the future and appear in the past, they moved through every instant in  
between."

"Etta." Olivia said, in a tone that said she'd had a revelation.

"Mom?" Etta asked, looking at her.

"That explains what I saw that day in the park, the day we lost Etta."

Olivia turned to her daughter, and grasped Etta's hands in her own. 

"Peter and I were running toward you, you were almost in his grasp...but he couldn't reach you. It was like time slowed down, or the distance from us to you was increasing. Then the blast hit us, and I woke up in the Red Cross tent."

Walter nodded again. 

"You were right where the Observers emerged in our time. To extend the analogy, you were standing on the shore when the wave front hit. Like a temporal tidal wave."

Etta nodded slowly, sudden comprehension animating her features.

“That...explains a lot, from my point of view. You remember, how I thought I was four? When you guys disappeared? I thought that because I was found in 2016. The outgoing tide must have swept me along, so to speak.”

The room was silent, as the group digested the implications.

Finally, Peter made a gesture toward his father, and spoke for everyone.

“So...” he said, “...is there anything we can do about this, at all? Do we have to repair the space-time continuum, or something?”

Walter shook his head.

“I don't see that there's anything we can do. The effects should gradually become less noticeable over time, and I don't have a clue what we should do if we wanted to bring an abrupt end to the phenomena. We'll just have to bear the effects over the next few years.”

“All right then,” Olivia said, “...in that case, let's get packed and go home.”

The ride home was uncharacteristically silent, each of them silently pondering the implications of all they’d learned.

Etta sorted her envelope full of family photos, gazed for a long time at one in particular, making a connection to her grandmother, Elizabeth, in the way she had with her mother through the bullet she wore around her neck.

And she remembered the other picture, the one the one that felt wrong, in her jewelry box. The one that made her shiver whenever she dared touch it. 

They reached the apartment just before noon. When they had finished putting everything they'd brought back from the lakehouse away, Etta tugged on Olivia's sleeve and tilted her head toward the room she shared with Astrid. 

“I have something to show you, mom.”

Olivia followed her into the bedroom, and watched with interest as Etta removed the folded picture from her jewelry box, and handed it to her.

Etta watched several different expressions flitted their way across Olivia's beautiful features.

“Yeah. I know who the woman is, she's my...double from the other universe. And I think I know who the boy is. We should show this to your father. If I'm right...well, it's incredible. He would want to see it.”

When they gave the picture to Peter, he took it gently, as if it might disintegrate in his grasp. Looking at it, his hands trembled. He stared at it for a long time, then he nodded and suddenly caught Etta in a powerful embrace.

“It's Henry,” he whispered, “Thank you.”


End file.
